


Shaky hands built this world

by weezzzer



Category: One Direction
Genre: M/M, Racism, cisgirl!Harry, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 07:13:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1542173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weezzzer/pseuds/weezzzer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re dangerously co-dependant. Niall breathes, Zayn breathes. Bodies and minds entwined so closely they’re hard to deduce as two separate bodies, as two separate minds, hearts that beat on their own. Honestly, it scares Zayn, but it isn’t going to change anytime, so.</p><p>Zombie Apocalypse AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shaky hands built this world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aguantare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aguantare/gifts).



> Drabble; I know. Firstly, the usual characterizations have been switched up, so. Lastly Zayn/Niall, you can't deny, they're good together.

Zayn's five when he notices a change, a subtle difference in the way everyone starts to talk and starts to act. It’s not much in the entirety of the situation, a slight shift in the complex structure of society. It wasn’t much that caused it, maybe just the pull of a trigger on a gun; because what’s really more destructive, the thought or the action?

“You’re prettier than us right? You’re half cast,” his cousins used to say, the ones he hardly ever saw, the ones his father didn’t like, the ones his mother gossiped about. He never knew what to say, silence was easier. Christmas had always held as much a place of significance in his life than Laylat al-Qadr, it made him feel as much welcome as it shut him out. His cousins were jealous of his parents, they envied his fair skin and his lighter coloured hair; he knew no better.

Then two towers were blown wide in the city that appeared in all his favourite movies, people died and the news was everywhere, and he felt bombarded with it. That Difference was suddenly thrust into the limelight, his Mother grew weary of the looks she was getting whenever she went out but his Father was adamant she wear a scarf, /‘you’re part of it now,’/ he used to say, anger like the sunset in his eyes. Zayn hated it, hated the fact that he had an escape route that was gradually being closed shut, bullying had always been a commonplace but now they included words he didn’t know the meanings of, words that burned and scratched more than the cuts on his scrawny arms or gashes on his knees. 

No one ever stood up for the poor Muslim boy, even teachers seemed to give him insinuated looks, but his fighting prowess never seemed to stretch that far. It was a confusing time for him, debatable at best. Some part of him grew angered at the thought, because he didn’t really need this, he could always pretend. He had that duality that others didn’t, every part of his life straddled both lines of culture, and it was hard to differentiate between the importance of Christmas and Eid, his Mother had always kept a rosary in her jewellery box, whilst he was always woken up by his Father's alarm for Fajr prayers.

High School opened up a wider avenue of adventure; that dark burning inside of him started to disperse outwards. He skipped classes, and hung outside local banks with a cigarette stolen off his brother and a group of miscreants crowding round him and hanging onto his every lie of a word. He refused to go to Mosque and deliberately made his Father angry with his new found agitation against religion; he made his mother cry with his antics, with the phone calls from school. He smirked in her face, something dirty and mischievous, got a sharp slap on the cheek, but later on, with arguing downstairs awakening the neighbours he’d open his window and cry at the moon behind the polluted clouds.

As he grew older he got used to it, slowly but surely, came to realise that life was only making itself harder the more he rebelled against his father. School never got better; he kept silent, made friends with a boy on his street, Niall, that typical neighbourhood boy who used to take him on long treks round the local park where young girls would run up to him and giggle into their hands, pink faced. Niall would step in and crack a stupid joke and then shove him onto a swing. Zayn was grateful. Niall kept him out of the trouble that was unavoidable, they might’ve stolen a couple of cigarettes from their fathers and smoked them in a garden shed; but Niall taught him to ignore the world, filled in that basic space of desperate yearning. Sure, there were still people with mendacious lips and pointed looks but ignorance was better. It never really stopped, those looks, those words, those articles in the newspapers.

He guesses it doesn’t really matter anymore. Not when he’s sat on the rooftop of an old sandwich shop, his tattered skateboard crooked under his arm, the world burning sensationally around him.

 

II

It must be late summer, the leaves are barely browning around the edges and the sun’s glare is high in the sky, a shadow long and dark as it follows Zayn's every movement. An old cathedral is directly to his right, sheathed in an unblinkable silence, the sunlight shooting through a broken pane of glass like an angled triangle, a laser of bright yellow light. There’s dust mingling in the air, shooting around like buzzing flies and hitting Zayn in the chest with the simplistic beauty of it. He wishes Niall were here to see this, walking through the middle of the street opening himself up as a target, but he’s raiding an old pharmacy for supplies.

He hears a dull footstep behind him, heavy on the asphalt, breathing rattling through rabid ribcages like--

It’s a zombie, Zayn knows it before he even turns around, and he should be used to it by now, but his palms still start to sweat a little and the penknife in his pocket starts to feel a little more solid. He wasn’t ever good at killing them, and he silently damns Niall for calling the baseball bat this morning when they shoved everything into their backpacks and planned the course for the day. he doesn’t say a word; they react like predators to prey to any sudden movement or sound. 

He reaches down to grapple nervously at the knife from his pocket as he slowly lifts his heel from the ground in a stance to run, it’d probably chase him, but he’s hoping he can swoop round and aim for the brain. Danny likes to kick it a little and watch it get all bloody and aggravated, but he’s more for an easy kill.

Just as he’s about to swing for it, after he’s caught sight of hunched shoulders and crooked arms, walking the catwalk of the dead with graceful chic, white shirt covered in its own blood that’s spilling from its slashed stomach. It topples to the floor, legs in an awkward angle, head smashed off with the swing of a golf club, broken groan falling from its cracked lips.

“Boo yah!”

Zayn watches its bloodied guts on the floor for a few silent seconds, tries not to lurch onto his only remaining pair of shoes. It’s been a year, he should be used to it by now, but for some reason, he can’t imagine he ever will. The dead eyes stare up at him, wide and dark; it reminds Zayn of his first kill, his aimless attempt at trying to shove away the drooling body that he thought had tried to lean in for a kiss but was really trying to get at his face. Niall had been the one to knock a fist into its stomach; it had crumpled towards the ground with a sickening crack that had stayed with him since.

(“The brain, get it in the brain Zee!” he’d shouted, shivering in the blatant warmth of their apartment, eyes wide like endless yards of blackened highways, scared, frightened, like the twelve year old Zayn was introduced to at a school fete.

The news reporter had said to hit it in the brain before everything blacked out because that’s the only way the abomination could die, be destroyed, but Zayn saw it as a person, a living breathing human being. It may have an ugly bite on its neck and a face like those Zayn used to shoot with a rifle in his video games; but it could’ve been him, in a dark, twisted crevice of his brain, that’s his future. The room started to spin in endless circles, blurring at the edges, the cacophony of Niall's shouts whirring with the traffic pouring through the open window to his left and the soft thrum of the fridge in the kitchen.

“Zayn, Zayn!” Niall was crying now, sobbing, kneeled on the floor next to the body, hands covered in the blood of the zombie, his treasured baseball bat beside him the splatters mixing with its red American stripes like some sort of messed up poetry. That’s how Niall grew up, how he ballooned out into a presence of soft yet arduous body, stiff round the corners that mattered the most. Soon after he was unrecognizable, smile gritty and too hard for Zayn to shoot back, but those crinkles still formed by his eyes, the familiarity of what was the past.)

“—little freak, you were gonna get killed,” Zayn blinks blearily, shades out the glare of the sun that’s hitting him straight in the eye with a grimy hand. She’s a petite little thing, with a gaudy head of raggedy bright pink hair like a highlighter. Smirking she steps forward, surveys Zayn for a minute with scrunched up eyes, before settling herself into a stance with the zombie’s crooked head between her legs. She winks at him before she takes her swing, her handicap just high enough to knock it straight of its shoulders and zooming through the sky.

Zayn stares at her a little more, too entranced to be considered rude. She steps back swinging dangerously, lets out a happy little sigh like she’s pleased of her achievements, the blood splattered up her pants like an anecdote.

The girl turns towards him, her smile bubbling down into something more serious that has Zayn itching at his forearm to look away; she looks perfectly capable at looking after herself, but Niall wouldn’t be happy about adopting any strays. Instead she swings the golf club over her shoulder, splatters Zayn's Docs with a trail of blood and holds out her hand. “Harriet. Call me Harry.”

Zayn raises his eyebrows, and she does the same back, fingers twisting self-consciously into the pockets of her jeans.

“M’ Zayn, just,” he shrugs, with a laugh, “just Zayn.”

Harriet nods, pulls back her hand, ruffles her hair instead, face wide in an awkward grin.

“So?” She whistles, trying to rid the discomforting silence between them only further weighed down by the breeze blowing past them and the sticky, bloody body on the pavement between them. Zayn hates talking, hates small talk and it’s forcefulness to draw out meaningless conversation that doesn’t matter. He’s obliged to tell her to go away, she’s done her business, had her fun, and he wasn’t calling for any help. He could handle it, he /was/ handling it.

“Oi Zee!” Niall's racing down the pathway, back creating obscenely large shadows between the cathedral pillars as he runs, backpack bulging and face scrunched into confusion. Niall frowns when he sees the girl, highlighter hair blowing around her face in the wind, golf club swung over her shoulder, her stance lazy yet oozing a confidence that Zayn flawed.

“Who’s that?” he asks, slowing down his pace, his voice getting a little defensive and loud.

Zayn shrugs, and Harriet looks mildly offended before straightening her scowl.

“I’m Harry, don’t mind me.” Then she winks at Zayn, jumps over the zombie and runs off into the passageway underneath the nave of the old cathedral, leaving behind only the echoing sounds of her feet against the ground.

 

III

There’s a splatter of black pepper across the sky, like the possibilities of it all instead of the probabilities. Niall's next to him, eyes wide with something that looks like vulnerability, dependability and broken slashes of what he’s supposed to be instead of what he is. Zayn knows it’s not supposed to feel like something is scrabbling against the dead weight of his rib cage, an ache trying to escape but instead of letting it out he sighs. Something long and drawn out at the suns seeps down under the horizon being pulled by Apollo and his golden chariot.

“Man, I wish I had some smokes around about now,” Niall sighs, leaning forward so his face is smushed against his knee and his voice is hard to make out. Zayn hums in acknowledgement, he was never one to smoke that much, maybe when he was little stressed out. Nial was the same until he started Uni and hung out with lots of those pretentious Art History students, the ones who wore vintage shirts from shops nobody knew, and had personalities that’d leave you as confused as a cat that barks.

Niall hated the analysing side of things, what actually required some deep thought and work; the interpreting of their ideas and their impressions and their techniques. He preferred getting sloppy, coming back home in paint splattered overalls and chalked up fingertips that’d get all over his bed sheets. Waking up in the morning to sketch out the sunrise in long, broad strokes or the silver plains of the moon with all her grains and her crevices and her curves. 

He’d take his sketchbook to Zayn's workplace on those Friday evenings when the flat felt too cold and too empty to fit in with the bustle of London seeping in through the flaking windowpanes. A biro tucked behind his ear ready to criss-cross in the stubby fingers wrapped out mugs, or the short limbs of the kids that’d knock into his knees as they ran by, jolting his coffee. Or the deep frown lines bump bump bump on their parents foreheads. Spray painting was undeniably his favourite, messy and bright and never quite perfect, he even did the bottom of Zayn's board one night. Blacks bleeding through into the top layer of purple and blue, bursts of colour like paint splatters across the deck of the board; an n/z scraped in with the needle of a compass on the nose of the board. A little scrawl of the name, a tradition, compressed so small it’s almost insignificant but its Zayn's favourite part, always.

“All that’s left is death, now, s’pose,” Niall sighs, like a question, twisting his fingers nervously in his lap, crouched into himself slight and small like the weight of the universe sits on his shoulders. Zayn nods, hopes it’s enough, and avoids looking anywhere else except the bleeding sky, something settling substantial in his throat and stopping him from speaking. But it’s okay, he doubt he’d be able to say anything vaguely comforting anyway. Niall does that to him sometimes, makes his feel inadequate to deal with someone who doesn’t need the adequacy.

IV

“Getting dark now, Innit?” Zayn says, finally, crossing one foot up on his knee, voice so quiet and small that it’s almost lost in the cold that’s washed over them now the sun has disappeared and only the clouds are left to aimlessly float along the bridges of blank, dark sky. They need to leave, get indoors soon; it’s much harder to keep track of everything in the dark. It’s much harder to get a direct hit on a predator around this time, the moon not yet raised, the darkness overwhelming.

They get insatiable without a feed and Zayn hates the acrid smell of a fresh turned zombie, they’re bloodier than usual, guts dripping to the floor and creating sticky pools every footfall. It only makes them seem more alive, eyes barely losing their lively colour, limbs crooked and bent aberrantly with veins climbing like vines outwards from dark splotchy bruises, exposed and alien with teeth impressions. It makes his breath catch in his throat with the thought that something so –- so inhumane could have possibly had a pulsing heart mere hours before. 

To describe the situation where they’re stood in front of you, illuminated by the moonlight, there are no words, you have to abandon all fears of the unknown in seconds once they approach, otherwise, well, you’re fucked. Zayn's still learning.

“Come on then.” Niall says, tiredly, kicking a loose pebble with the toe of his trainers like he’s angry with it. If Zayn wasn’t so afraid he would have wanted to take the longer way round the back of the cathedral, through the cobbled alleyway that lies to the left of the entryway, bathed in the streetlights that still flicker on and off in the midst of endless darkness that’s enveloped the world. But, frankly, he doesn’t feel up for the trek. Niall swings his baseball bat up over his shoulder as they walk down the swirling fire escape, dodging past a gunmetal Mercedes in the car park with its wheels tilted inwards and blood splattered across its smashed headlights. Zayn's slower, taking each step with a breath, running his fingers across the rough surface of beatified saints on glass windows, cold and dead beneath his fingers.

On past Sundays he imagines the square that lies in front would have been a bustling organ of life, beating and breathing as hoards of people posed for pictures and admired her curves and sharps. Now, though, it’s as cold as ice, air having been sucked out along with the rest of the world, trails of blood along her cobbled brick strains and glass smashed and pointy like fingernails. Zayn steps down, takes one last long look, before Niall calls for him, exasperated, because they will be back tomorrow, if they don’t die tonight.

They live not too far from her spiralling spires, a couple of rooftop drops away, although live probably isn’t the best word, hibernate is probably more accurate. It’s a shacked up old apartment block with peeling ceilings and dusty blinds that barely let in the drifty sunlight in the mornings. Zayn thinks he’d like living there, if the world wasn’t so empty. Congregated amongst the bubble of the city, squashed like a bug in the corner, the noise a background noise to his hopefully domesticated life, maybe. It is an odd mixture of furniture, the previous owners clearly an eclectic mix of people. A large red velvet couch the heart of the living room, polished flagstones in the kitchen alongside a six-eye gas range and little cat mannequins that line the window with oddly piercing eyes.

It’s got a musky old smell to it, the walls marred with scratches and the carpets home to a stains; it’s lived in, and full of memories. Sometimes he hears laughter resonating through the now empty hallways, the clanging of kitchen ware and the spark of lights. It feels wrong, like he’s sofa surfing and he could get booted out at any moment; but then he remembers he’s only got Niall left and he feels worse.

Niall sighs when he shoulder through the door, eyes droopy with the night. Zayn drops his backpack on the old velvet couch, kicks off his shoes and stretches out his arms in a yawn. Niall has already curled up on the floor, sleep having stolen him away, swathed beneath a mottled brown blanket, feet poking out of the ends, a pillow under his head. Zayn smiles, slender and barely hanging in the fringed of his mouth, his eyelids are glistening in the neon bright streetlights filtering in through the half shuttered blinds. Niall looks soft faced in the stages of sleep and it isn’t the ideal image that Zayn had always imagined, but it slims the pit of meanness in his belly all the same.

V.

Niall smiles so wide it’s like a grimace, it might be one, lips curled sarcastically, bitterly, like he’s not letting it get to him but showing his anger with his face as a mask. He looks younger, like the boy Zayn remembers sauntering around school, tie undone and smile lazy. He hadn’t been the most complimenting of characters, and Zayn was always wary of his dark eyes wide like yards of ocean, crooked almost calculating smile. Attractively quiet, to Zayn at least, he smiled like he meant it with dark eyes that glittered and settled something deep in the mine of his stomach, weighed him down and kept him still.

Zayn frowns. “I don’t want to leave though, it --,” he cuts himself off – blindingly and obviously- much too weary to fight for himself. Not that he should be complaining anyways, Niall has only ever wanted the best for him. But for some reason he’s grown attached to the buildings that surround him, the wide arched cathedral that climbs above every other building, that glows in view, familiar and optimistic. It’s weird how something so substantial was wormed its way into his life, sewn a little piece of itself into his patchwork life. He balls up and throws away the thought before it overwhelms him, like living without warm-glowing streetlights, another face that smiles, another warm body.

They’re dangerously co-dependant. Niall breathes, Zayn breathes. Bodies and minds entwined so closely they’re hard to deduce as two separate bodies, as two separate minds, hearts that beat on their own. Honestly, it scares Zayn, but it isn’t going to change anytime, so.

He leans into Niall's side, kisses his exposed shoulder, once, twice, whispers /love you/and watches the morphed and fucked up world go from day to night.


End file.
